As Trumpism wanes, SNL mistakes misogyny and homophobia for comedy

If anyone needed a sign that Saturday Night Live has completely lost its cultural and comedic compass, they need only watch the catastrophic opening monologue of Shane Gillis’s latest appearance.I guess Gillis was attempting to shock the live studio audience when he blah-blah-blahed one of the unfunniest lines I have ever heard. Seriously. It wasn’t just useless and pointless; it was lazy. Gillis looks lazy, so I guess it all fits.He frothed that you are either “gay or you’re Hitler.” If you laughed at that line, you are dumber than Gillis. It wasn’t just offensive. It was profoundly, and boy, do I mean profoundly, lame. Only morons laugh at “gay,” and only sickos think Hitler is even remotely funny.Case in point: “gay.” At his recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump made a bizarre, hyper-fixated public evaluation of Sen. Jon Husted’s body. It relied on an outdated “locker room” aesthetic, using a defensive, homophobic punchline to demonstrate a form of objectification that Trump alone thinks is comedy. And those idiotic, homophobic Ohioans standing behind him were weirdly laughing.And how about the way the GOP is treating James Talarico? Rather than focusing on policy, right-wing wackos like Kari Lake stooped to a humiliating new low by weaponizing Talarico’s routine flu recovery into a vulgar, transphobic conspiracy theory about him getting “bottom surgery.”Related: Kari Lake turns James Talarico’s flu recovery into a ridiculous ‘bottom surgery’ conspiracy theoryAnd that’s the point. They are the only ones laughing at this stupid stuff.Back to Gillis. His line didn’t get a ha-ha-ha from me because it relies on a truly exhausted, decades-old, intolerant comedy delivery that thinks casual bigotry is, for lack of a better word, edgy. For a 50-year-old American institution like SNL, letting Gillis host says a lot about how broken the show’s culture is. Bringing on a comedian whose entire style relies on cheap, outdated slurs show